Ian McDonald Quotes

I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings.

She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials.

That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled.

Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

The words still don't move. The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them.

Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear.

Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather.

It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.

Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.